Every programmer ever born thinks whatever idea just popped out of their head into their editor is the most generalized, most flexible, most one-size-fits all solution that has ever been conceived. We think we've built software that is a general purpose solution to some set of problems, but we are almost always wrong. We have the delusion of reuse. Don't feel bad. It's an endemic disease among software developers. An occupational hazard, really.
Wait, soā¦ you do have your 3 partners or you donāt? And is there a lot of competition or are you desperate for just about anyone with a moderately visited website?
Weāre still evaluating who Partner #3 will be at this time, if youād like to be considered, read through http://www.discourse.org/buy/ for additional information.
Is Discourse as popular as you describe it? I had an impression that the project slowly caved in. I tried it a few times, so have my friends. Then I havenāt heard a thing about it since the launchā¦ until now
What will be discourse when it is launched since it is open source? I mean do you plan it for premium hosting, or you want to make money just by support, plugins and marketplace, or anything else? The whole idea of open source really astonishes me since there is no actual advantage of going this way (at least I donāt see it yet).
Do you have any formal promotion/gating criteria for evaluating when to begin the next application test for your software? Such as a audience size, engagement etc?
Also, do you wait to hit this criteria(assuming it exists) before starting the next one?
Where did I describe it as popular? Is forum software popular? Are forums popular? Itās not exactly a sexy category, which is something weāre trying to fix.
I had an impression that the project slowly caved in.
Discourse is moving its way up the top 50 projects on GitHub, based on https://github.com/popular/starred at least. Currently at around #41 and rising.
For software reuse Rule of Three does make a lot of sense. This rule can be extrapolated to every Startup. Even Paul Graham persuades āBetter to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalentā. All the best.
BTW, is there any ālarger than life moustache-twirling, cape-wearingā enemy for Discourse?
Is it public knowledge who the first two Discourse partners are? Are they using Discourse in a live environment yet or still working through things with you?
Iāve never heard of EE (well till today) or maybe thatās because Iām no Expert? Oh well Discourse is Good. Used it on 2 forums already cant complain. Keep it up!
The 3rd partner could well be Ubuntu, see http://ubuntu-discourse.org/ .
(It gets quite buzy since the current security leak of the old Ubuntu forums.)
This is actually pretty fascinating. Iāve always wondered why Stack Exchange became a bunch of splintered sites, and this article sufficiently explains that itās because of your interpretation of the ārule of three.ā I still think SE should have been one site with multiple main categories instead of separately-branded āmini meā sites, but at least I now understand why you thought the approach made sense.
The rule of three is good here because it reminds people that reusability does not come free.
So many times I see teams in paralysis at the beginning of a project, because while they could solve the problem trivially, they must be sure that the entire system is perfectly abstract, generic, flexible etc. Next they will start the waves of refactoring, long before anything has been completed.
This is for making code that will almost certainly be used for a narrow focus only, not a reuse library.
Is this blog ever going to be for us again? I donāt come here very often any more because all the articles are simply singing the praises of whatever new thing Jeff Atwood is working on today.
In this case Iām not talking about those āBig Aā application like StackExchange or Discourse, Iām talking about the little things that you end up doing over and over and each time you do you start with copy and paste and spend just a little extra time polishing a bit here or improving a comment there.
Those little snippets that you use again and again and whenever you do you feel just a tiny bit better about yourself as a coder.
